18 comments to Will Ron Paul be able to Walk This Back?

Interesting you didn’t provide a link to the “debunking.” Your assertion, while vigorous, is irrelevant absent evidence.

Feel free to share a link to a reputable source that debunks this specific document (anything like PolitiFact or some other reputable journalism source) and I’d be happy to retract the post and point out the error. Non-reputable sources (Townhall.com, BigWhatever.com, WorldNetDaily, blogs, OpEds from any source or other non-journalism sites) will be laughed at and you will be humiliated in public.

If you are able to provide this information, I will communicate my error to the sources who originally provided the document and ask them to do the same.

It wasn’t debunked it ’07. If you’d bothered to read the linked article, you’d know that. Ron Paul and his campaign staff vigorously defended the newsletters in the press and on the campaign for five years, with their strongest objection being that the quotes weren’t written by someone else or fabricated or Not Ron Paul’s but rather “taken out of context.” It wasn’t until 2001 that they stumbled on the idea of claiming that they were someone else’s. (All this courtesy of the people Reason.com, who don’t have incentives for slagging a Libertarian candidate.) That still left a decade’s worth of thousands of pages of racist, nativist, homophobic, conspiracist comments printed under Ron Paul’s name, either with his consent or by his pen (which makes him a racist) or without his knowledge (which makes him incompetent).

Funny that you mention 2007, though. That was the same year the not-racist Paul made this statement:

“We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked. Most of them are, well, you know, they just don’t look very American to me. If I’d have been looking, they look suspicious.”

If he didn’t write them then why isn’t he trying to find out who did? There’s been no mention of him being upset or concerned that he wrote them. He was also on C-Span in 1994 talking about the very same newsletter that he’s denid writing. Paul is a racist and a liar.

Stick to your guns, Phil. My guess is that “Nicholas” subscribes to the Fox News “some people say” school of thought. On the other hand, if he can back up his claim with *legitimate* sources, so be it.

@voteDem10. The same sort of thing happened to me – I embraced a black friend in front of another black man, who said to my friend (when I left), “You’re friends with a white man?! I would never be friends with a white man. The white man is our enemy. Even my four year old girl knows that. She hates white people.” Ron Paul is simply making an observation of a real cultural phenomenon. Children aren’t born haters. Hate is taught.

No, Ron Paul is making an observation that black people hate white people, not that racism is taught. In none of these newsletters is there any anecdotal evidence presented of whites hating black people, no reference to the long standing institutionalized racism against blacks, no discussion of the latent racism (not being overtly racist but also not standing up to or preventing the overt racism) of whites on blacks.

These newsletters could have been issued by Stormfront or some other neo-Nazi white supremacist group and no one would know the difference.

I think you’re missing the point. Ron Paul wasn’t saying that racism is taught, he’s saying blacks are racist. His diatribe was directed at the participants in the 1992 Los Angeles Riots which were a response to the Rodney King verdict.

At the time, people fell on one side or the other of the verdict. Ron Paul picked the wrong side.

That statement and alternative versions of it is a tic of Ron Paul’s that I have heard him use in interviews. Usually it’s along the lines of “It’s never happened”, “I’ve never heard of it”, “It just doesn’t happen”. Appearing in that last racist paragraph, it really stands out as the kind of formulation Paul uses regularly.

Ron Paul makes some really good points that display pragmatism & stunning honesty (at least for a politician). And then, he’ll follow them up with complete and total insanity.

Regardless of which side of issues you generally take, unless you’ve drunk the Kool-aid, if you listen to the guy talk for any duration of time, you’ll find yourself alternating between “Right on” and “WTF?”

Has a single notable African American complained about this or even brought it up past commenting rather casually or in the case of the NAACP debunking it? I think not. Still a vocal faction of whites with suspicious agendas keep dredging this up. Interesting.

That’s hardly relevant. I notice that you don’t deny that Ron Paul is an unreformed racist prick unfit to hold public office. But I expect that if Racist Ron Paul does well in Iowa or New Hampshire, you will hear a lot more about this.